Bob P wrote:how many times anyone's likely to have been effected by circular dependencies while performing ~x86 stage 1 installs would largely depend upon how many stage 1 installs they've done during this period, and whether or not their timing was good or bad.
wow...i've been lucky...i've done many ~x86 stage 1 installs and never had these kinds of problems.
i'm grateful to this thread for opening my eyes to a couple of things. i've only ever done stage 1 installs...came to gentoo specifically because i'm a control freak who wanted to be able to configure everything (but couldn't quite be arsed with LFS, which looked like it would take about a month) and stage 1 was, according to the handbook, the way to do this...so i've never even considered 2 or 3, or anything else.
i was curious about installs because i want to put gentoo on a couple of other PCs on this LAN, and (since one in particular is very slow) wasn't keen on the idea of stage ones (this athlon 3000+ goes from fdisk to fully working graphical desktop in one day, but i'm guessing the same process on the old P2-300 could be verrrrrrry painful). unfortunately, since they're all such different hardware i can't just compile binaries on this one and slap gentoo ready-made onto the others...so i was thinking about cross-compiling etc.
however...now i will take a look at some of the other options discussed in this thread. i agree with what's been said about learning from stage 1 installs, but have to admit that i can't comment on how this learning compares with stage 3 or whatever, since i've never tried them. the news that optimisation only happens AFTER bootstrapping etc. is a bit of a shock...i'm ignorant, and thought there would be something in there that would benefit from compiler options...i'm going to have to take a closer look at the other methods of gentoo installation and see if i can't achieve what i want in much less time.
having said that though...one final comment re stage 1...i happen to ENJOY watching my pc build its own os...so even if it turns out that some of this building is redundant, i don't think i'll be ditching this installation method completely.
